When the modern tech giants get a lead and find the way to monetise it they are difficult to knock off their perch.

Last week a report on paid testimonial management found that Trustpilot had an impact on search visibility that was up to 300% better than their direct competitors. I advise small businesses to think carefully before committing to send out invites for independently verified reviews. To stay on the treadmill of inviting customers to give feedback, promptly managing the real complaints and the fake, whilst keeping up the 150 reviews per year to please Google.

There is one other, free, option; Google+ the loser to Facebook. As the Google Executive who was tasked with challenging Facebook learned when his young daughter asked “Why, daddy? Everyone’s already on Facebook!” He quit for Microsoft.

To get Google’s 5 Gold Stars on your Ad or organic search listing requires over 150 reviews in a year, see below. Google will withdraw these stars immediately if they detect that invites are no longer being sent out. Reviews are best fresh.

Yet on Google’s local business listings you can get the 5 Gold Stars with far fewer reviews as you can see from the local result from the same search. So I do recommend that my clients also send out invites with links to their Google Local pages. They just ask if they have a gmail address or Google account login. Another loser who continue to serve businesses differently is Checkatrade. They never even made it onto the Google list of recommended review sites; supporting postal and phone verification and the less connected. Checkatrade also allowed me to find a good local electrician to help my mother in law in Sandbach. You cannot search for good businesses on Trustpilot except by searching down a list from Yell or Google.

When planning my trip to Prague last month I used guidebooks and TripAdvisor to get up-to-date reports. Closer to the date I used Google maps.

Google has supplemented their logged in community of Adword experts with YouTube and then Android phone users. So this is how they can report when a business is open and when it is most busy, see the restaurant listing, above, right. I was recently taken back to a review of an excellent café in a Copenhagen park that I had added to TripAdvisor only to see the status ‘Closed’. Unfortunately, this was not about their opening hours!

My first experience was of the microprocessor battle between the 2 architectures RISC v CISC, Motorola v Intel. Then the first loser was Texas Instruments who turned to the smaller 4-bit processor for washing machines, TVs, microwaves etc. We courageously used both the x86 and 6800 on the same project as alternate sources. We found that initially that the network performance of the Intel was 5 times faster when our architecture experts were betting on Motorola. The difference was a better driver code or software. We got both working but Intel won long term and Motorola moved on to Apple and elsewhere.

New players can still set up new niches but more and more these will be bought up a great expense by one of the giants filling out the gaps in their platforms.